


sound leaves your body (like a cry, a burning sigh)

by meritmut



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Episode 81, Gen, deaths and their resulting hangovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 22:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10228838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: (and still I cannot explain / whatever chills me, thrills me more / if this fire burns me / let it warm me firstdon’t remember / don’t start hesitating now / and whatever you do / don’t look down)Dying again digs up some stuff.





	

Her brother is beside her when she clambers out of the tunnel and for a moment Vex halts, caught in the grip of a memory. It’s one of the countless she shares with him, in the same way they share Syngorn, and their father, and the weight of _not enough._

Vax carries that weight more lightly than she, always has, but where the past is concerned they're driven by the same hope—the same faith that if they only keep looking ahead, if they can only put enough years and miles behind them, they can escape its shadow once and for all, or else exchange it for something better.

 _(I will trade you half a lifetime’s worth of wishing and wanting,_ she used to think to passing strangers, _if you lend us your laughter and a full stomach for an hour._ And—in the quietest, most desperate corners of her mind— _I will give all the years my brother and I had no one but each other if you never take him from me.)_

Those years fall away, she sways on the edge of the abyss with her heart skittering like a wild thing in her chest and Vax’s steady warmth at her side and they are young in a way they haven’t been since they stood together in the graveyard of Byroden, orphans of the dragon.

_Mother..._

Vex reaches down, her hand blindly seeking her brother’s, pushing back against the onslaught of the past.

_Mama, where are you?_

It’s not real, the memory of the fire. They never saw Byroden again but as a place slowly mending, scarred earth and a host of unmarked graves and a great silent vault of loss locked away at its heart. They came back to it too late: too late to save their mother, too late to die with her.

Vax had been the one to pull them both away from the graves when Vex’s feet wouldn’t move, when she was frozen where she stood with the phantom sensation of ash on her fingers and smoke in her mouth, her eyes fixed unseeing on some distant point where the horror of the dragon’s attack played out again and again, Elaina dying over and over and the scream that lodged itself in Vex’s throat is the same one she fights back now, a little girl’s voice high and tight with fear— _no—no no, Mama_ —her head is full of acrid air and nightmarish laughter and _this, is this what it would’ve been like, if we’d made it there in time?_

(Not frozen, _burning.)_

Vax had been the stronger one then, the way he always has been. Taking her hand, he had touched her face to wipe away her tears, left greyish marks on her cheeks from where he’d dug down to place his favourite bracelet in the earth,  _to be with her_. Vex hadn’t been able to claw her way out of the cave of her own grief long enough to help him, had only whispered _my comb_ and let him tug it gently from the coils of her braid to bury too, and once it was in the ground he’d wrapped his hands around hers again and wordlessly led her away from the town, coaxing her along though there’d been tears streaming down his cheeks all the while and it was only later, when she caught her reflection in the lake they set up camp beside that Vex saw the dirt on her own face, like she’d been weeping ash; like the dragon had gotten her too.

She blinks, and the world is still on fire, and maybe things haven’t changed that much after all.

The sky groans beneath the dark weight of the storm, brindled thunderheads streaked with infernal light from the flames that still tear through the streets. The Cloudtop consumes itself and they’re standing right at its heart, the red ground beneath their feet spiderwebbed with cracks and fissures and it isn’t _right_ that nothing feels different. Thordak’s dead—they _killed_ him, they wear his blood with their own, there ought to be _something_ changing in the world to mark it.

There ought, thinks Vex, to be light. Sunshine, parting the clouds and spilling down in silver-gold streams from above; a breeze to chase away the heat of the dragon’s eldritch work and beat back the furnace-hot air and smoke; rain to flood through the streets and wash them clean again.

In her half-dazed state she imagines an undoing: imagines flames crawling back into themselves, the broken walls and towers climbing high again in a swift unmaking of ruin as the charred ground breaks open to new and green things growing beneath.

But—for now, all is as it was before they dove into the tunnel, the earth itself mute to the goings-on beneath it (like her, battered and aching from head to foot but on the outside _whole_ , there are some things that run too deep to ever be seen on the surface). The red beast is dead and the green one is gone and Vex wants to howl into the sky _we’re alive, we’re alive, some-fucking-how we’re still alive,_ but when all of Emon is howling who would hear?

Who but Vax, who has half-carried her this far and now bears far more of her than that—she leans against him as they scan their surroundings, trying to pretend it’s only exhaustion and a multitude of bumps and scrapes and not the dull weight sitting like a stone on her sternum, nor the disorientating sensation of being somehow six inches to the left of herself, watching the world smoulder through eyes that refuse to focus.

Through the haze and the smoke Vex begins to make out the shapes of buildings, places that withstood the attack and the elemental corruption that followed: most of Emon still stands, she realises, and when the worst of the devastation is cleared away it might yet resemble the city Vox Machina called home.

(They’ve still had to leave that home behind, though, and it never gets easier, never gets any less terrible to lose.)

“Zahra,” Vex hears herself saying, and then they’re scrambling over the blackened earth towards the gate, hoping— _praying,_ and she isn’t sure when she first spoke out to the night and hoped something other than her own mind's voices would answer but she does now, clutching the note in her fist— _please, let them—let them be alright, alive, please_ —

Kash’s voice rings out across the street like a strident thunderclap and the relief goes surging through Vex so fiercely that she _laughs,_ jogging forwards through the ache in her bones and the fatigue sapping her strength (she stumbles twice anyway, nearly loses her footing altogether on the uneven ground but she shoves past it; won't let her mind consider that it's more than mere weariness). Kash and Zahra look like they’ve been dragged through a bonfire backwards but they’re alive, both of them, charging through the smoke with hellfire on their heels and a wild bloody joy on their faces, a matching exhilaration that softens and brightens all at once in Zahra’s quicksilver eyes when she catches sight of the twins and hastens toward them, Kash barely a pace behind.

Vex doesn’t realise she’s shaking until Zahra’s arms are around her, squeezing her tight enough to put bruises on her bruises but all her aches and pains pale against the joyous chant of _alive, alive, alive_ in her head like sunlight shattering in raindrops. They’re safe, both of them, Zahra a furnace in her arms while beside them Kash and her brother slip easily into their preferred form of affectionate violence. Vex closes her eyes against the dragons and the giants and the _fire_ and holds tight to the immediacy of this reunion, this small sphere of _Zahra-Kash-Vax_ which is almost enough to chase away the numb weight in her chest entirely.

Almost.

She takes in a breath, remembers that for a few brief moments she’d been dead again, and the stone sitting on her breastbone grows heavier.

**Author's Note:**

> title/lyric from 'crimson course' by phantasma


End file.
